The wiki market space has transformed over the past few years with a number of the existing players adding social features to keep them competitive and more fully dimensional for users.

But we are starting to wonder how many wiki providers can play in the more established spaces of the market. Perhaps the best potential for emerging vendors is in the small business market, which is increasingly open to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environments.

cctext is a new wiki environment. It joins a number of more robust collaborative products that integrate wikis and social web technologies into their products. Perhaps there is an opening. Many of the first entrants to the market have moved up the ladder, due to their deeper product offering.

For instance, Socialtext started as a wiki provider and now offers social networking; social messaging; weblogs; dashboards and distributed spreadsheets. MindTouch calls itself an open-source collaboration engine for the enterprise and the web. PBWorks operates far deeper in the collaboration space as well. They recently introduced Social Collaboration Update, which in their words « includes social networking-style user profiles, Twitter-style microblogging, and the ability to create wiki pages (with file attachments) just by emailing a single email address. »

This trend is an example of how social applications are segmenting. As developers learn to add more pieces of information into their wiki products, they look more like content management systems than what we have traditionally called a wiki.

cctext, for its part, is a straight forward wiki that is counting on its speed and UI to give it a jump in the market.

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They may be on to something. Customers do complain about speed. A recent tweet about PBWorks expressed this pretty clearly:

cctext claims its speed comes from its cloud infrastructure. They use Amazon Web Services. We tested cctext and it does appear to be pretty fast when writing, editing and saving information. cctext allows for media uploads that play in the wiki. We uploaded a video. It worked fine but we could not view it. We used a test account so it may have been unviewable for that reason. Overall, cctext is a pretty clean experience. They have a pretty thorough list of features.

All in all, cctext is a wiki that truly is a wiki. It’s a basic tool for small business. Cost is $12 per month. First ten users are frree. cctext integrates with Google Apps. Pricing is the same for the Google Apps version.